Poems About Birds, From the Middle Ages to the Present Day

by H. J. Massingham

Excerpt

IN England the birds are all around us. As I write I am in a room in Outer London, with miles of suburbs still between me and the open country. I have just stood, first at the back window, over the small garden with its acacia, its two pear-trees, its little grove of lilacs and flowering currants, and then at the window in front which overlooks a road, a waterside garden, and the osiers of Chiswick Eyot and the Thames, with the houses of Barnes beyond. Everywhere there are birds, perched and flying starlings crossing the upper air, sparrows troubling the holly, a thrush intermittently singing behind the upper veils of the ash-tree, chafinches tin/ding somewhere unseen. So it is all the year. In mere point of frequency the birds are far more commonly seen here than anything else in animate nature, except ing man for us they are, to all intents and purposes, animate nature. There are insects, many if one loo/es for them, few if one does not a pair of chasing white butterﬂies, a ladybird on a rose-lecy', a little bronzed beetle now and then, and in their season caterpillars (y the currant and vapourer moths. Animals, beyond the domestic, are not here at all. Twice a year, per haps, I may hear a 'plop in the water and catch sight of a ripple and the head of a water-rat hurrying to the overhung bank of the island. But the birds are always present, numerous and various, even here. The twittering of the small birds is perpetual every morning's dew is printed with the claws of blackbirds and thrushes, a robin nested this year behind the thick streamers of the virginia creeper onvthe back wall.